BLOGS

Tag: glaciergate

I haven’t read all the new material yet that my good friends at DeSmogBlog are producing. But I have long been suspicious of the attacks on leading climate researchers, like the recently vindicated Michael Mann, because they are so obviously diversionary, and yet also so obviously strategic.

There is no doubt that those attacks have been mounting; I believe a new and full scale “war on science” is afoot in the climate arena, something I hope to say more about shortly.

But in the meantime, it appears that following ClimateGate and GlacierGate, we are once again getting some revelations taking on the other side. Maybe this means the pendulum will shift, and good science can move back off the ropes, where it has been for too long. We’ll see. I’ll be watching closely.

My latest blog post for Science Progress is up; it’s about the scientific black-eye known now as “GlacierGate,” in which the IPCC was found to have published plagiarized misinformation about the vulnerability of the Himalayan glaciers to climate change in its Fourth Assessment Report. The content was indefensible; a quick retraction should have occurred. But instead, there was wagon-circling and defensiveness and hence, we have yet another scandal on our hands.

Here’s a sampling of my take:

…without exonerating the IPCC in this instance—there is no defense for such shoddy work—let’s attempt to inject a little sanity here. The IPCC goofed, but we should keep matters in perspective. We’re talking about one tiny section of a 938-page report on how climate change will affect different parts of the world. It would be amazing if errors did not slip into such a vast document, whatever the professed peer review standards may be. And the mistake was originally caught not by skeptics, but by scientists, including an IPCC report co-author. In the broadest sense, the scientific process is actually working here, even if the IPCC stumbled in this case.

Moreover, Himalayan glaciers are retreating, even if they’re not doing so faster than glaciers in other parts of the world, and even if they won’t be gone by 2035. As a team of scientists who exposed the IPCC’s mistake in a letter to the journal Science judiciously put it:

This was a bad error. It was a really bad paragraph, and poses a legitimate question about how to improve IPCC’s review process. It was not a conspiracy. The error does not compromise the IPCC Fourth Assessment, which for the most part was well reviewed and is highly accurate.

That’s the true significance of “GlacierGate,” but sure enough, it is being vastly misused in yet another cynical attempt to undermine all of earthly climate science.